Stephen R. Donaldson - The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever 1 - Lord Foul's Bane

VIP免费
2024-12-02 0 0 610.58KB 187 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
LORD FOUL'S BANE
By: Stephen R. Donaldson
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Unbeliever BOOK ONE
C 1977
**SCANNED BY LUPINIV FEB01**
ONE: Golden Boy
SHE came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in
the path of the gray, gaunt man who strode down the center of the walk like a mechanical derelict.
For an instant, her heart quailed. Then she jumped forward, gripped her son by the arm, snatched
him out of harm's way.
The man went by without turning his head. As his back moved away from her, she hissed at it, "Go
away! Get out of here! You ought to be ashamed!"
Thomas Covenant's stride went on, as unfaltering as clockwork that had been wound to the hilt for
just this purpose. But to himself he responded, Ashamed? Ashamed? His face contorted in a wild
grimace. Beware! Outcast unclean!
But he saw that the people he passed, the people who knew him, whose names and houses and
handclasps were known to him-he saw that they stepped aside, gave him plenty of room. Some of them
looked as if they were holding their breath. His inner shouting collapsed. These people did not
need the ancient ritual of warning. He concentrated on restraining the spasmodic snarl which
lurched across his face, and let the tight machinery of his will carry him forward step by step.
As he walked, he flicked his eyes up and down himself, verifying that there were no unexpected
tears or snags in his clothing, checking his hands for scratches, making sure that nothing had
happened to the scar which stretched from the heel of his right palm across where his last two
fingers had been. He could hear the doctors saying, "VSE, Mr. Covenant. Visual Surveillance of
Extremities. Your health depends upon it. Those dead nerves will never grow back-you'll never know
when you've hurt yourself unless you get in the habit of checking. Do it all the time-think about
it all the time. The next time you might not be so lucky."
VSE. Those initials comprised his entire life.
Doctors! he thought mordantly. But without them, he might not have survived even this long. He had
been so ignorant of his danger. Self-neglect might have killed him.
Watching the startled, frightened or oblivious faces -there were many oblivious faces, though the
town was small-that passed around him, he wished he could be sure that his face bore a proper
expression of disdain. But the nerves in his cheeks seemed only vaguely alive, though the doctors
had assured him that this was an illusion at the present stage of his illness, and he could never
trust the front which he placed between himself and the world. Now, as women who had at one time
chosen to discuss his novel in their literary clubs recoiled from him as if he were some kind of
minor horror or ghoul, he felt a sudden treacherous pang of loss. He strangled it harshly, before
it could shake his balance.
He was nearing his destination, the goal of the affirmation or proclamation that he had so grimly
undertaken. He could see the sign two blocks ahead of him: Bell Telephone Company. He was walking
the two miles into town from Haven Farm in order to pay his phone bill. Of course, he could have
mailed in the money, but he had learned to see that act as a surrender, an abdication to the
mounting bereavement which was being practiced against him.
While he had been in treatment, his wife, Joan, had divorced him-taken their infant son and moved
out of the state. The only thing in which he, Thomas Covenant, had a stake that she had dared
handle had been the car; she had taken it as well. Most of her clothing she had left behind. Then
his nearest neighbors, half a mile away on either side, had complained shrilly about his presence
among them; and when he had refused to sell his property, one of them moved from the county. Next,
within three weeks of his return home, the grocery store-he was walking past it now, its windows
full of frenetic advertisements had begun delivering his supplies, whether or not he ordered them-
and, he suspected, whether or not he was willing to pay.
Now he strode past the courthouse, its old gray columns looking proud of their burden of justice
and law-the building in which, by proxy, of course, he had been reft of his family. Even its front
steps were polished to guard against the stain of human need which prowled up and down them,
seeking restitution. The divorce had been granted because no compassionate law could force a woman
to raise her child in the company of a man like him. Were there tears? he asked Joan's memory.
Were you brave? Relieved? Covenant resisted an urge to run out of danger. The gaping giant heads
which topped the courthouse columns looked oddly nauseated, as if they were about to vomit on him.
In a town of no more than five thousand, the business section was not large. Covenant crossed in
front of the department store, and through the glass front he could see several high-school girls
pricing cheap jewelry. They leaned on the counters in provocative poses, and Covenant's throat
tightened involuntarily. He found himself resenting the hips and breasts of the girls-curves for
other men's caresses, not his. He was impotent. In the decay of his nerves, his sexual capacity
was just another amputated member. Even the release of lust was denied to him; he could conjure up
desires until insanity threatened, but he could do nothing about them. Without warning, a memory
of his wife flared in his mind, almost blanking out the sunshine and the sidewalk and the people
in front of him. He saw her in one of the opaque nightgowns he had bought for her, her breasts
tracing circles of invitation under the thin fabric. His heart cried, Joan!
How could you do it? Is one sick body more important than everything?
Bracing his shoulders like a strangler, he suppressed the memory. Such thoughts were a weakness he
could not afford; he had to stamp them out. Better to be bitter, he thought. Bitterness survives.
It seemed to be the only savor he was still able to taste.
To his dismay, he discovered that he had stopped moving. He was standing in the middle of the
sidewalk with his fists clenched and his shoulders trembling. Roughly, he forced himself into
motion again. As he did so, he collided with someone.
Outcast unclean!
He caught a glimpse of ocher; the person he had bumped seemed to be wearing a dirty, reddish-brown
robe. But he did not stop to apologize. He stalked on down the walk so that he would not have to
face that particular individual's fear and loathing. After a moment, his stride recovered its
empty, mechanical tick.
Now he was passing the offices of the Electric Company-his last reason for coming to pay his phone
bill in person. Two months ago, he had mailed in a check to the Electric Company-the amount was
small; he had little use for power-and it had been returned to him. In fact, his envelope had not
even been opened. An attached note had explained that his bill had been anonymously paid for at
least a year.
After a private struggle, he had realized that if he did not resist this trend, he would soon have
no reason at all to go among his fellow human beings. So today he was walking the two miles into
town to pay his phone bill in person-to show his peers that he did not intend to be shriven of his
humanity. In rage at his outcasting, he sought to defy it, to assert the rights of his common
mortal blood.
In person, he thought. What if he were too late? If the bill had already been paid? What did he
come in person for then?
The thought caught his heart in a clench of trepidation. He clicked rapidly through his VSE, then
returned his gaze to the hanging sign of the Bell Telephone Company, half a block away. As he
moved forward, conscious of a pressure to surge against his anxiety, he noticed a tune running in
his mind along the beat of his stride. Then he recollected the words:
Golden boy with feet of clay,
Let me help you on your way.
A proper push will take you far
But what a clumsy lad you are!
The doggerel chuckled satirically through his thoughts, and its crude rhythm thumped against him
like an insult, accompanied by slow stripper's music. He wondered if there were an overweight
goddess somewhere in the mystical heavens of the universe, grinding out his burlesque fate: A
proper push leer will take you far-but what a clumsy lad you are! mock pained dismay. Oh, right,
golden boy.
But he could not sneer his way out of that thought, because at one time he had been a kind of
golden boy. He had been happily married. He had had a son. He had written a novel in ecstasy and
ignorance, and had watched it spend a year on the best-seller lists. And because of it, he now had
all the money he needed.
I would be better off, he thought, if I'd known I was writing that kind of book.
But he had not known. He had not even believed that he would find a publisher, back in the days
when he had been writing that book-the days right after he' had married Joan. Together, they did
not think about money or success. It was the pure act of creation which ignited his imagination;
and the warm spell of her pride and eagerness kept him burning like a bolt of lightning, not for
seconds or fractions of seconds, but for five months in one long wild discharge of energy that
seemed to create the landscapes of the earth out of nothingness by the sheer force of its
brilliance-hills and crags, trees bent by the passionate wind, night-ridden people, all rendered
into being by that white bolt striking into the heavens from the lightning rod of his writing.
When he was done,
he felt as drained and satisfied as all of life's love uttered in one act.
That had not been an easy time. There was an anguish in the perception of heights and abysses that
gave each word he wrote the shape of dried, black blood. And he was not a man who liked heights;
unconstricted emotion did not come easily to him. But it had been glorious. The focusing to that
pitch of intensity had struck him as the cleanest thing that had ever happened to him. The stately
frigate of his soul had sailed well over a deep and dangerous ocean. When he mailed his manuscript
away, he did so with a kind of calm confidence.
During those months of writing and then of waiting, they lived on her income. She, Joan Macht
Covenant, was a quiet woman who expressed more of herself with her eyes and the tone of her skin
than she did with words. Her flesh had a hue of gold which made her look as warm and precious as a
sylph or succuba of joy. But she was not large or strong, and Thomas Covenant felt constantly
amazed at the fact that she earned a living for them by breaking horses.
The term breaking, however, did not do justice to her skill with animals. There were no tests of
strength in her work, no bucking stallions with mad eyes and foaming nostrils. It seemed to
Covenant that she did not break horses; she seduced them. Her touch spread calm over their
twitching muscles. Her murmuring voice relaxed the tension in the angle of their ears. When she
mounted them bareback, the grip of her legs made the violence of their brute fear fade. And
whenever a horse burst from her control, she simply slid from its back and left it alone until the
spasm of its wildness had worn away. Then she began with the animal again. In the end, she took it
on a furious gallop around Haven Farm, to show the horse that it could exert itself to the limit
without surpassing her mastery.
Watching her, Covenant had felt daunted by her ability. Even after she taught him to ride, he
could not overcome his fear of horses.
Her work was not lucrative, but it kept her and her husband from going hungry until the day a
letter of acceptance arrived from the publisher. On that day, Joan decided that the time had come
to have a child.
Because of the usual delays of publication, they had to live for nearly a year on an advance on
Covenant's royalties. Joan kept her job in one way or another for as long as she could without
threatening the safety of the child conceived in her. Then, when her body told her that the time
had come, she quit working. At that point, her life turned inward, concentrated on the task of
growing her baby with a single-mindedness that often left her outward eyes blank and tinged with
expectation.
After he was born, Joan announced that the boy was to be named Roger, after her father and her
father's father.
Roger! Covenant groaned as he neared the door of the phone company's offices. He had never even
liked that name. But his son's infant face, so meticulously and beautifully formed, human and
complete, had made his heart ache with love and pride-yes, pride, a father's participation in
mystery. And now his son was gone-gone with Joan he did not know where. Why was he so unable to
weep?
The next instant, a hand plucked at his sleeve. "Hey, mister," a thin voice said fearfully,
urgently. "Hey, mister." He turned with a yell in his throat -Don't touch me! Outcast unclean!-
but the face of the boy who clutched his arm stopped him, kept him from pulling free. The boy was
young, not more than eight or nine years old-surely he was too young to be so afraid? His face was
mottled pale-and-livid with dread and coercion, as if he were somehow being forced to do something
which terrified him.
"Hey, mister," he said, thinly supplicating. "Here. Take it." He thrust an old sheet of paper into
Covenant's numb fingers. "He told me to give it to you. You're supposed to read it. Please,
mister?"
Covenant's fingers closed involuntarily around the paper. He? he thought dumbly, staring at the
boy. He?
"Him." The boy pointed a shaking finger back up the sidewalk.
Covenant looked, and saw an old man in a dirty ocher robe standing half a block away. He was
mumbling, almost singing a dim nonsense tune; and his mouth hung open, though his lips and jaw did
not move to shape his mutterings. His long, tattered hair and beard fluttered around his head in
the light breeze. His face was lifted to the sky; he seemed to be staring directly at the sun. In
his left hand he held a wooden beggar-bowl. His right hand clutched a long wooden staff, to the
top of which was affixed a sign bearing one word: "Beware."
Beware?
For an odd moment, the sign itself seemed to exert a peril over Covenant. Dangers crowded through
it to get at him, terrible dangers swam in the air toward him, screaming like vultures. And among
them, looking toward him through the screams, there were eyes-two eyes like fangs, carious and
deadly. They regarded him with a fixed, cold and hungry malice, focused on him as if he and he
alone were the carrion they craved. Malevolence dripped from them like venom. For that moment, he
quavered in the grasp of an inexplicable fear.
Beware!
But it was only a sign, only a blind placard attached to a wooden staff. Covenant shuddered, and
the sir in front of him cleared.
"You're supposed to read it," the boy said again.
"Don't touch me," Covenant murmured to the grip on his arm. "I'm a leper."
But when he looked around, the boy was gone.
TWO: "You Cannot Hope"
IN his confusion, he scanned the street rapidly, but the boy had escaped completely. Then, as he
turned back toward the old beggar, his eyes caught the door, gilt-lettered: Bell Telephone
Company. The sight gave him a sudden twist of fear that made him forget all distractions. Suppose-
This was his destination; he had come here in person to claim his human right to pay his own
bills. But suppose-
He shook himself. He was a leper; he could not afford suppositions. Unconsciously, he shoved the
sheet of paper into his pocket. With grim deliberateness, he gave himself a VSE. Then he gripped
himself, and started toward the door.
A man hurrying out through the doorway almost bumped into him, then recognized him and backed
away, his face suddenly gray with apprehension. The jolt broke Covenant's momentum, and he almost
shouted aloud, Leper outcast unclean! He stopped again, allowed himself a moment's pause. The man
had been Joan's lawyer at the divorce-a short, fleshy individual full of the kind of bonhomie in
which lawyers and ministers specialize., Covenant needed that pause to recover from the dismay of
the lawyer's glance. He felt involuntarily ashamed to be the cause of such dismay. For a moment,
he could not recollect the conviction which had brought him into town.
But almost at once he began to fume silently. Shame and rage were inextricably bound together in
him. I'm not going to let them do this to me, he rasped. By hell! They have no right. Yet he could
not so
easily eradicate the lawyer's expression from his thoughts. That revulsion was an accomplished
fact, like leprosy-immune to any question of right or justice. And above all else a leper must not
forget the lethal reality of facts.
As Covenant paused, he thought, I should write a poem.
These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives: for all the scents of green things
growing, each breath is but an exhalation of the grave. Bodies jerk like puppet corpses, and hell
walks laughing-
Laughing-now there's a real insight. Hellfire.
Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?
He felt that he was asking an important question. He had laughed when his novel had been accepted -
laughed at the shadows of deep and silent thoughts that had shifted like sea currents in Roger's
face laughed over the finished product of his book laughed at its presence on the best-seller
lists. Thousands of things large and small had filled him with glee. When Joan had asked him what
he found so funny, he was only able to reply that every breath charged him with ideas for his next
book. His lungs bristled with imagination and energy. He chuckled whenever he had more joy than he
could contain.
But Roger had been six months old when the novel had become famous, and six months later Covenant
still had somehow not begun writing again. He had too many ideas. He could not seem to choose
among them.
Joan had not approved of this unproductive luxuriance. She had packed up Roger, and had left her
husband in their newly purchased house, with his office newly settled in a tiny, two-room but
overlooking a stream in the woods that filled the back of Haven Farm-left him with strict orders
to start writing while she took Roger to meet his relatives.
That had been the pivot, the moment in which the rock had begun rolling toward his feet of clay-
begun with rumbled warnings the stroke which had cut him off as severely as a surgeon attacking
gangrene. He had heard the warnings, and had ignored them. He had not known what they meant.
No, rather than looking for the cause of that low thunder, he had waved good-bye to Joan with
regret and quiet respect. He had seen that she was right, that he would not start to work again
unless he were alone for a time; and he had admired her ability to act even while his heart ached
under the awkward burden of their separation. So when he had waved her plane away over his
horizons, he returned to Haven Farm, locked himself in his office, turned on the power to his
electric typewriter, and wrote the dedication of his next novel:
"For Joan, who has been my keeper of the possible."
His fingers slipped uncertainly on the keys, and he needed three tries to produce a perfect copy.
But he was not sea-wise enough to see the coming storm.
The slow ache in his wrists and ankles he also ignored; he only stamped his feet against the ice
that seemed to be growing in them. And when he found the numb purple spot on his right hand near
the base of his little finger, he put it out of his mind. Within twenty-four hours of Joan's
departure, he was deep into the plotting of his book. Images cascaded through his imagination. His
fingers fumbled, tangled themselves around the simplest words, but his imagination was sure. He
had no thought to spare for the suppuration of the small wound which grew in the center of that
purple stain.
Joan brought Roger home after three weeks of family visits. She did not notice anything wrong
until that evening, when Roger was asleep, and she sat in her husband's arms. The storm windows
were up, and the house was closed against the chill winter wind which prowled the Farm. In the
still air of their living room, she caught the faint, sweet, sick smell of Covenant's infection.
Months later, when he stared at the antiseptic walls of his room in the leprosarium, he cursed
himself for not putting iodine on his hand. It was not the loss of two fingers that galled him.
The surgery which amputated part of his hand was only a small symbol of the stroke which cut him
out of his life, excised him from his own world as if he were some kind of malignant infestation.
And when his right hand ached with the memory of its lost members, that pain was no more than it
should be. No, he berated his carelessness because it had cheated him of one last embrace with
Joan.
But with her in his arms on that last winter night, he had been ignorant of such possibilities.
Talking softly about his new book, he held her close, satisfied for that moment with the press of
her firm flesh against his, with the clean smell of her hair and the glow of her warmth. Her
sudden reaction had startled him. Before he was sure what disturbed her, she was standing, pulling
him up off the sofa after her. She held his right hand up between them, exposed his infection, and
her voice crackled with anger and concern.
"Oh, Tom! Why don't you take care of yourself?"
After that, she did not hesitate. She asked one of the neighbors to sit with Roger, then drove her
husband through the light February snow to the emergency room of the hospital. She did not leave
him until he had been admitted to a room and scheduled for surgery.
The preliminary diagnosis was gangrene.
Joan spent most of the next day with him at the hospital, during the time when he was not being
given tests. And the next morning, at six o'clock, Thomas Covenant was taken from his room for
surgery on his right hand. He regained consciousness three hours later back in his hospital bed,
with two fingers gone. The grogginess of the drugs clouded him for a time, and he did not miss
Joan until noon.
But she did not come to see him at all that day. And when she arrived in his room the following
morning, she was changed. Her skin was pale, as if her heart were hoarding blood, and the bones of
her forehead seemed to press against the flesh. She had the look of a trapped animal. She ignored
his outstretched hand. Her voice was low, constrained; she had to exert force to make even that
much of herself reach toward him. Standing as far away as she could in the room, staring emptily
out the window at the slushy streets, she told him the news.
The doctors had discovered that he had leprosy.
His mind blank with surprise, he said, "You're kidding."
Then she spun and faced him, crying, "Don't play stupid with me now! The doctor said he would tell
you, but I told him no, I would do it. I was thinking of you. But I can't-I can't stand it. You've
got leprosy! Don't you know what that means? Your hands and feet are going to rot away, and your
legs and arms will twist, and your face will turn ugly like a fungus. Your eyes will get ulcers
and go bad after a while, and I can't stand it-it won't make any difference to you because you
won't be able to feel anything, damn you! And-oh, Tom, Tom! It's catching."
"Catching?" He could not seem to grasp what she meant.
"Yes!" she hissed. "Most people get it because" for a moment she choked on the fear which impelled
her outburst "because they were exposed when they were kids. Children are more susceptible than
adults. Roger- I can't risk- I've got to protect Roger from that!"
As she ran, escaped from the room, he answered, "Yes, of course." Because he had nothing else to
摘要：

LORDFOUL'SBANEBy:StephenR.DonaldsonTheChroniclesofThomasCovenantandUnbelieverBOOKONEC1977**SCANNEDBYLUPINIVFEB01**ONE:GoldenBoySHEcameoutofthestorejustintimetoseeheryoungsonplayingont\hesidewalkdirectlyinthepathofthegray,gauntmanwhostrodedownthecenterofthewalkl\ikeamechanicalderelict.Foraninstant,he...

展开>> 收起<<
Stephen R. Donaldson - The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever 1 - Lord Foul's Bane.pdf

共187页,预览5页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：187 页 大小：610.58KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-02

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 187
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注